'Volcano' of oil to be absorbed using stockings stuffed with HUMAN HAIR as BP attempt to contain leak is aborted

Containment device: The cofferdam being lowered yesterday at the site of the sunken oil rig spewing thousands of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico

Human hair stuffed into nylon stockings is being collected for its efficiency at absorbing large amounts of oil

Slick: Oil started to slosh ashore yesterday on a chain of islands off the Louisiana coast

* Ice crystals thwart containment of leak
* Oil starts to wash ashore on animal sanctuary islands off Louisiana coast
* Human hair is collected to absorb spill
* Blowout was triggered by a bubble of methane gas that shot up from rig
* Watch underwater footage of oil gushing into the ocean

Following the failure of the BP attempt to contain the gushing oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, citizens on the Louisiana coastline are pitching in – by donating their HAIR to soak up the spill.

Barbershop and salon cuttings are being stuffed into nylon stockings to form a ‘hair boom’ that which will be placed in areas of the spill to soak it up.

Astonishingly, each pound of hair is capable of absorbing as much as a gallon of oil.
The bizarre effort is being led by the charity Matter of Trust, which used the same tactics when 58,000 gallons of fuel oil spilled from a container ship in the San Francisco Bay area in 2007.

And now the organization has found itself almost overwhelmed by up to 450,000 pounds of donated hair.


Greasy: Oil washes onto the sides of a pollution containment chamber as the mobile offshore drilling unit Q4000 lowers it into the Gulf of Mexico over the site of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill

Aerial view: This image released by Greenpeace shows the drilling relief well on the deck of the ship with the containment structure that will be used to try to stop the leak

Controlled fire: Dark clouds of smoke and fire emerge as oil burns in the Gulf of Mexico yesterday. The 'in situ burn' was carried out by the U.S. Coast Guard to try and prevent the further spread of oil

The inside of the chamber that was used to try to contain the Deepwater Horizon oil

A remote operated vehicle is lowered into the ocean to assist in the oil spill containment efforts last night. The plan had to be aborted after ice crystals encased the structure which was set to stem the leak

Around 450,000 pounds of human hair has already been received for the effort

Donations of wool, animal hair and fur coats are also being encouraged.

It comes after a novel but risky attempt to use a 100-tonne steel-and-concrete box to cover a deepwater oil well was aborted after ice crystals encased it, an ominous development as thick blobs of tar began washing up on Alabama's white sand beaches.

The setback left the mission to cap the ruptured well in doubt. It had taken about two weeks to build the box and three days to cart it 50 miles out then slowly lower it to the well a mile below the surface, but the frozen depths were too much for it to handle.

However, BP officials overseeing the clean-up efforts were not giving up just yet on hopes that a containment box - either the one brought there or a larger one being built - could cover the well and be used to capture the oil and funnel it to a tanker at the surface to be carted away.

Officials said it would be at least Monday before a decision was made on what next step to take.

'I wouldn't say it's failed yet,' BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles said yesterday. 'What I would say is what we attempted to do ... didn't work.'

There was a renewed sense of urgency as coin- to golfball-sized balls of tar began washing up on Dauphin Island, three miles off the Alabama mainland at the mouth of Mobile Bay and much farther east than the thin, rainbow sheens that had so far arrived sporadically in the Louisiana marshes.

'It almost looks like bark, but when you pick it up it definitely has a liquid consistency and it's definitely oil,' said Kimberly Creel, 41, who was swimming with hundreds of other beachgoers.

'I can only imagine what might be coming this way that might be larger.'
About a half dozen tar balls had been collected by Saturday afternoon at Dauphin Island, Coast Guard chief warrant officer Adam Wine said in Mobile. Authorities planned to test the substance but strongly suspected it came from the oil spill.

A long line of materials that resembled a string of pompoms were positioned on a stretch of the shore. Crews walked along the beach in rubber boots, carrying rubbish bags to clear debris from the sand.

Brenda Prosser, of Mobile, said she wept when she saw the workers.

'I just started crying. I couldn't quit crying. I'm shaking now,' Prosser said. 'To know that our beach may be black or brown, or that we can't get in the water, it's so sad.'

Prosser, 46, said she was afraid to let her nine-year-old son, Grant, get in the water, and she worried that the spill would rob her of precious moments with her own child.

'I've been coming here since I was my son's age, as far back as I can remember in my life,' Prosser said.

In the three weeks since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers, about 210,000 gallons of crude a day has been flowing into the Gulf. Until Saturday none of the thick sludge - those iconic images of past spills - had reached Gulf shores.

It was a troubling turn of events, especially since the intrepid efforts to use the containment box - the size of a four storey house - had not yet succeeded.
It had taken more than 12 hours to slowly lower it to the sea floor, a task that required painstaking precision to accurately position it over the well or it could damage the leaking pipe and make the problem worse.

It was fraught with doubt since nothing like it had been attempted at such depths with water pressure great enough to crush a submarine. It ended up encountering icy crystals, familiar territory for deepwater drilling.

The icy build-up on the containment box made it too buoyant and clogged it up, BP's Suttles said.

Workers who had carefully lowered the massive box over the leak nearly a mile below the surface had to lift it and move it some 600 feet (183 meters) to the side. If it had worked, authorities had said it would reduce the flow by about 85 percent, buying a bit more time as a three-month effort to drill a relief well goes on simultaneously.

Company and Coast Guard officials had cautioned that ice-like hydrates, a slushy mixture of gas and water, would be one of the biggest challenges to the containment box plan, and their warnings proved accurate. The crystals clogged the opening in the top of the peaked box like sand in a funnel, only upside-down.

Options under consideration included raising the box high enough that warmer water would prevent the slush from forming, or using heated water or methanol to prevent the crystals from forming.

Steve Rinehart, a BP spokesman in Mobile, Alabama, said late Saturday a second containment device was under construction by Wild Well Control, Inc., in Port Fourchon, Louisiana, the company that built the first one.

'It's the same general idea and approach. It may be a slightly different size and shape,' he said.Even as officials pondered their next move, Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry said she must continue to manage expectations of what the containment box can do.

'This dome is no silver bullet to stop the leak,' she said.

The captain of the supply boat that carried the precious cargo for 11 hours from the Louisiana coast earlier last week wasn't giving up hope.

'Everybody knew this was a possibility well before we brought the dome out,' Capt. Demi Shaffer, of Seward, Alaska, told a reporter stationed in the Gulf in the heart of the containment zone with the 12-man crew of the Joe Griffin. 'It's an everyday occurrence when you're drilling, with the pipeline trying to freeze up.'

The spot where Deepwater Horizon rig once was positioned is now teeming with vessels working on containing the well. There are 15 boats and large ships at or near the site - some being used in an ongoing effort to drill a relief well, another with the crane that lowered the containment device to the seafloor.

There is even a vessel at the site called the Seacor Lee that is sending a live video feed from the undersea robots back to BP's operations centre in Houston.

'Everyone was hoping that that would slow it down a bit if not stop it,' said Shane Robichaux, of Chauvin, a 39-year-old registered nurse relaxing at his vacation camp in Cocodrie, Louisiana 'I'm sure they'll keep working on it 'til it gets fixed, one way or another. But we were hopeful that would shut it down.'

The original blowout was triggered by a bubble of methane gas that escaped from the well and shot up the drill column, expanding quickly as it burst through several seals and barriers before exploding, according to interviews with rig workers conducted during BP PLC's internal investigation.

Deep beneath the seafloor, methane is in a slushy, crystalline form. Deep sea oil drillers often encounter pockets of methane crystals as they dig into the earth.

As the bubble rose up the drill column from the high-pressure environs of the deep to the less pressurized shallows, it intensified and grew, breaking through various safety barriers, said Robert Bea, a University of California Berkley engineering professor and oil pipeline expert who detailed the interviews to an Associated Press reporter.

'A small bubble becomes a really big bubble,' Bea said. 'So the expanding bubble becomes like a cannon shooting the gas into your face.'

An estimated 5,000 barrels of oil per day have been leaking from the wrecked wellhead on the sea bed.

Some 100 ships have been laying protective booms and pouring chemicals on the oil to disperse it.

Favourable weather conditions have helped to prevent the oil from washing ashore. But last night oil was reported to be washing up on the shores of New Harbor Island, off Louisiana.

It has been estimated that the clean-up operation and compensation bills could cost BP more than £10billion.